Top all-time · #23905
The Zen of Coding
Personal blog · joel.idprogrammingsystems
The Zen of Coding is a personal blog at joel.id about programming and systems. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The one comment profiles the author's career: Wall Street banks, Deutsche Bank, a venture-backed company, and a licence sold to Electronic Arts. It does not discuss the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Finding flow
What Hacker News says?
The key is that AI adapted, not stole. It's actually capable of reasoning and generating derivative code and not just copying stuff wholesale. See examples at the bottom of my post: https://joel.id/ai-will-write-your-next-compiler/
Comment linking /ai-will-write-your-next-compiler/
on “AI has a deep understanding of how this code works”Submitted Hacking LLDB for a great Zig debugging experience as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'm the author of the PR. No, I'm not AI or bot, etc. Yes, my resume is genuine and is even more weird than what was listed (see https://joel.id/resume ). Oh, and I live in Kyiv. As for the PR itself, it was a PR stunt that I regret now as the code works and solves a real problem (at least for me!). I'll probably redo it, once I have spare Claude $$$ which I'm using for other projects now ( https://joel.id/build-you…
Comment linking /ai-will-write-your-next-compiler/
on “AI has a deep understanding of how this code works”Submitted Zig type hackery and memory management as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis guy's resume is quite something to behold: 1) Slummed it through the ranks of various Wall Street banks [1] 2) Became the Director of Prime Brokerage Technology at Deutsche Bank in 1999 [2] 3) Went through venture capital round in 2000 and in 9 months built a company valued at over 1,000,000 USD [0] 4) Sold license to Electronic Arts (EA) to power EA World Series of Poker (WSOP). [3] 5) Wrote, but had to cancel…
Comment linking /resume/
on “AI has a deep understanding of how this code works”